Photo by flickr/chrislang

Resources

Key documents

• VERIFOR Briefing Paper 6 - Convergence between Certification and Verification in the drive to Legality Assurance: assessing the pros and cons (PDF, 272kb)

See also

• Bibliography - certification

Forest certification rose as an industry-led initiative as a result of an impasse on global inter-governmental regulation. Since the early 1990s, actors such as WWF have sought to use certification as the primary means to promote sustainable forest management practices, and a number of certification schemes have risen to prominence as a result.

Certification has proven an effective instrument in certain types of forests, chiefly planted forests and others with a high degree of standardisation and secure access and ownership rights. This has been typically the case in the temperate regions of Western Europe and North America, and (to a varying extent) Central/South America. However, certification has proven less applicable in other contexts, particularly the tropical regions of Africa and SE Asia where natural forests are more complex in their structure (and thus, less easily reconstituted after harvesting), and where, for a variety of reasons including the colonial inheritance, access and ownership rights are problematic. These countries have also tended to be ones which are considered ‘high risk’ in the timber trade, because of their poor forest governance (itself usually a product of wider governance problems).

Partly in recognition of the limited success of certification in regions such as Africa and SE Asia, in the early 2000s, attention turned to the verification of legality as a vehicle to progress international forest policy. This was seen to offer a more feasible way of improving the quality of forest management, without recourse to complex notions of ‘sustainability’. ‘Legality’ was seen as a much simpler concept, and one that would be easier for states to deliver. It was thus viewed as a more attractive option in the shorter term, as well as a stepping stone to sustainable production in the longer term.

Some key differences between certification and verification

Recently, the emphasis on verification of the legality of internationally-traded timber brought by the forest law enforcement and trade movement (FLEGT) has increased interest in the potential of private sector forest certification schemes as a mechanism not only to promote sustainable forest management but also - and more controversially - to verify legal timber. There is evidence of a convergence between the two streams of practice, with several producer governments said to be willing to consider certification as a surrogate for formal legality assurance.

VERIFOR is researching on the pros and cons of the convergence, looking for conditions that need to be met if the two instruments are to function in a mutually supportive way.